In today's world, computers and computers are ubiquitous on both personal and entity levels. The data stored in these computers is important in many ways. Consequently, it is advisable to protect the data. Of course, there are different ways to protect the data.
For instance, data could be protected at least from unauthorized use and/or from loss. Data can be encrypted, for example, in an attempt to prevent unauthorized access to the data. Of course, simply encrypting the data does not necessarily protect or prevent the data from being lost. As a result, many entities or users also backup their data to guard against loss.
A common way to protect data is to backup the data “in the cloud” such as in a datacenter. This requires a client to upload their data to the datacenter. Because the data is uploaded, however, the data is no longer directly under the client's control and there is a potential that the data may be viewed by a third party or by the backup provider.
To protect against these types of problems, clients that back up their data online or in the cloud also encrypt their data. While this may provide protection against loss and against unauthorized loss, backing up data online and/or encrypting the data can still pose problems for both the data owner and the backup provider. For example, it is more difficult to deduplicate encrypted data. Deduplicating encrypted data is more complicated when the backup provider is unable to see the data in the clear (unencrypted). At the same time, encrypted data is difficult to share. Access to the encrypted data is more difficult to establish. For example, it is difficult to share specific data without allowing access to other data.
Systems and methods are needed that allow data to be protected and that allow improved access to the data that has been backed up.